Glow of the City

In this celebrated print, published just a month before the crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, Lewis offers a poignant contrast between old and new, sacred and secular, rich and poor in Manhattan. The woman, whose fashionable dress and hairstyle contradict her Lower East Side tenement setting, looks longingly toward the soaring and radiant Chanin Building in the distance. The skyscraper illuminates the night, its height accentuated by a hazy column of steam. Lewis interposes the spire of a nineteenth-century church (which once stood near the Manhattan entry to the Queens Midtown Tunnel) between the woman and the skyscraper, also bracketing the looming building with the clothesline poles of the tenement block. The clothing hanging from the lines behind her and the occasional silhouette visible at a window comment on these nameless and faceless occupants of the city, literally tied to their circumstances here. When completed in 1929, the Art Deco style Chanin Building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue was the third tallest building in the world (after New York’s own Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower and Woolworth Building) and by far the tallest north of 23rd Street. Berenice Abbott photographed the Chanin Building many times, most notably from a vantage point atop its more famous neighbor, the Chrysler Building, which was completed just a year later.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Stuart M. Blumin, and presented at the Johnson Museum August 11–December 23, 2012)